A small-scale limited print 1/20 (100mm x 100mm) of life underground in the South Wales Valleys.

The cage. An iron lift that dropped miners hundreds of feet into the dark. Day and night, it carried generations to the coalface, to heat homes and power an empire, often at great personal cost.

A mine shaft that once dropped men hundreds of feet beneath the valleys every day. These were the gates to another world. You’d descend before dawn and not see the sky again until your shift was done.

The Daily Descent

This print captures that moment of transition. The brief pause before the cage drops away into darkness. It’s about the routine nature of extraordinary danger, the way something as terrifying as plunging hundreds of feet underground became just another part of the working day.

Conditions were brutal: heat, gas, dust, cramped spaces. The danger was constant.

The cage itself was both lifeline and trap. Your way down to work, your way back up to family. But also a reminder of how far from the surface world you were, how dependent you became on that iron box to carry you between light and dark.

The Print

What strikes me about these daily journeys is how they became ordinary. Extraordinary danger normalized through repetition. Men who descended into these shafts day after day, year after year, carrying the weight of keeping the lights on above.

This piece, carved small but printed with care, is a tribute to those moments of quiet courage—the everyday heroism of stepping into the cage one more time.

Hwyl fawr/Goodbye,
Dan